Inspectional reading is a skimming of the book to understand its main points and its structure. It aims to gain the best understanding of the book in a limited time.
When most people read a book, they do so cover to cover, starting with page one and reading it all the way to the end. While this is more straightforward in some ways, it’s actually worse for comprehension - you’re trying to understand what a book is about at the same time you are trying to understand it.
With inspectional reading, your goal is to gain the best understanding of the book in a limited time. Set a target for 15 minutes to comprehend a 300-page book.
Analogy: Think of yourself as a detective looking for clues to a book’s general idea.
How to Read Inspectionally
After reading inspectionally, you want to be able to answer these three questions:
- What genre does the book fit into?
- What is the book saying as a whole?
- What is the structure of the book used to develop the main point?
Techniques for Inspectional Reading
- Read the title.
- This can be more informative than you think. “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” suggests the book begins with the height of the Empire, at the Age of the Antonines. It doesn’t cover the rise of the Roman Empire.
- Read the preface, blurb.
- The author often explain what the book is about, and how to tackle it.
- Read the table of contents.
- (Shortform note: This is less effective if books now obfuscate titles to generate a sense of mystery.)
- Scan the index for range of topics covered. More important topics will have more pages.
- Find the main chapters of the book, and read the summary areas of those chapters.
- The summary areas are often at the end of the chapter, or at the end of each major section.
- Thumb through the book, listening for the basic pulse of the book.
- (Shortform suggestion: also try reading the top Amazon reviews of the book, or scanning through our summary of a book.)
When tackling a difficult book, never pause to look up things you don’t know. This will make you miss the forest for the trees. Even if you understand less than 50%, this cursory reading will improve your comprehension on the second time around, ultimately saving time.
- School taught us bad habits: we were instructed to pay attention to things we didn’t understand, to go to a dictionary with an unfamiliar word, to define every allusion and consult footnotes. The author bemoans the way Shakespeare is taught - students never really read Shakespeare.
Categorizing a Book
When starting a book, figure out what genre of book it is. This prepares you to customize your engagement with the particular type of text. You’d engage a philosophy teacher differently from a physics teacher, and so you would treat a book from one genre differently from another.
The broad categorizations of genres are:
- Fiction vs Expository
- Expository books convey knowledge - opinions, theories, data.
- Theoretical vs Practical
- Theoretical works describe what is or that something is the case. Practical works teach you how to do something.
- Questions about the validity of something are theoretical; raising questions about the purpose it serves is practical.
- Any book that instructs you on what you should do is practical, including books on ethics (how to live our life) and economics (eg how to organize economic life of societies).
- Within theoretical books, there’s a categorization of History vs Science vs Philosophy
- History describes events that happened on a particular date in a particular place. Science and Philosophy books treat matters that can happen at any time or place - seeking timeless laws.
- Science deals with data that is outside the realm of your everyday comprehensible experience (eg cellular proteins doing things unobservable to you; species evolving beyond your observable time scale). Philosophy deals with things that are accessible to you everyday (eg the nature of happiness).
X-Raying a Book
Every good book has a skeleton that forms the structure of the book. The author covers the skeleton with flesh; your job is to strip it away to expose the skeleton again.
The methodical way to do this:
- Articulate the unity of the book in a sentence.
- Often the author does this for you. Science/philosophy writers have no reason to keep you in suspense, as suspense will deter you from reading it through.
- Construct an outline of the major parts of the book, showing the relation to each other and to the unity of the whole.
- Done methodically, it lists the major sections of the book; then outlines each section of the book; then outlines each subsection.
- Not every book deserves this treatment. Give the book the treatment it deserves.
- Aquinas’s commentaries on Aristotle are good examples.
Note that books are not meant to be published as mere outlines. The flesh of a book adds life to the skeleton and make them a joy to read.
If you can’t do the two above, then the fault may be in the book, as the author has failed to do her job.
Examples of Book X-Rays
Unity of The Wealth of Nations: “This examines the source of national wealth in any economy that is built on a division of labor. To study the price of commodities, it considers the factors of the wages paid labor, the profits returned to capital, and the rent owed the landowner. It discusses how capital can be more or less gainfully employed, and it describes the history and use of money to the accumulation and deployment of capital. It compares wealth in different nations and in different conditions. And comparing the economic and political systems, it argues for the benefits of free trade.”
Outline of Aristotle’s Ethics: “The work is divided into these main parts: 1) discussing happiness as the goal of life, and its relation to all other practicable virtues; 2) discussing the nature of voluntary action, and its relation to forming good and bad habits; 3) discussing various virtues and vices, both moral and intellectual; 4) discussing moral states that are neither virtues nor vices; 5) discussing friendship; 6) discussing pleasure.”